Street Grids and Traffic

Something that comes up a lot in discussions about housing in Bend is traffic and congestion, especially talking about the east side of town.

If you look at how cities used to be built, with a fine grained grid, it turns out that that’s probably the best strategy.

Grids have been used in cities for thousands of years: the Romans used them and they probably weren’t the first.

The older areas of Bend have a nice grid, where if one intersection is blocked off, you can easily detour around it. It’s never that far between two points on the grid, and travel is mostly predictable.

Compare and contrast with the east side, which has more cul-de-sac and arterial development, where a few big roads get all the traffic, and many roads don’t go anywhere. This might be nice for the people who get no traffic, but it has a high cost in terms of resilience and adaptability, two qualities in high demand for a rapidly growing city.

Here are two adjacent properties – neighboring houses – where the drive to get from one to the other is 1.5 miles!

No wonder traffic can be problematic in that area and will get worse as it grows – you have to drive on a major road just to get to a neighboring house!

Unfortunately, I do not know if there are any good solutions to this conundrum – you can’t go back and impose a grid on areas like that at this point, because it’s all built out and people live in those houses.

The best we can do is go back to a sensible, flexible, adaptable design that has served humanity well for thousands of years for our future development.